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  • why I blame myself for being raped (hint: not because it’s my fault)

    All my life I have been me. I didn’t realise it at first. Presumably, as we say of infants, I was an extension of the everything, was my mother, I was the flitting shadows of the leaves that made up the sky overhead. I was as wide as the ends of the world, as far as I could hear and see: I extended that far, from my drowsy solid wakeful little base in this body, a foot-long version of this body. I was the basis of everything that is. I was its essence.

    Now, they say, presumably, still I am all that; only I might need LSD or enlightenment, meditation to tell me.

    Childhood grew out of infancy. Adolescence sprouted – helped along, in my case, by the pills my mother gave me through a doctor on Wickham Terrace. The steep, repressive residency of illness in Brisbane was lined with psychiatrists. Specialists there had known my grandmother, a widow since birth. They would cock their heads and say wistfully, “You must be Audrey Jorss’s granddaughter.” We had just landed from Jakarta and were reeling in the grassy dry suburbs.

    When people say a hothouse flower they mean protected. Spoilt, and preserved from spoiling, because beauty makes girls more deserving. A hothouse shields flowers from wind, and the rain, but affords all of the sun: through glass. I was hothoused in the sense of force-ripened, and pushed into bloom. Artificial puberty was supposed to mature the body so I would at last stop from growing. They don’t talk about that theory anymore. And though it made no sense I felt for years afterwards because it had been sudden, that my figure was formed on the progesterone and oestrogen the doctor gave me in little white pills and which I swallowed every morning, only because it did not occur to me to flush them.

    Bus drivers wouldn’t believe I wasn’t sixteen, but I was twelve. I was far too tall already, a fact strangers never tired of pointing out to me. Beauty sprang. I didn’t know about this. Every week my mother brought home news of some comment, to impress it on me. People remarked on my appearance not just to note but to interpret it, and to impose. The principal of the infants’ school, outside Sydney, when I was four, had told my mother: “That girl will be Prime Minister one day. Just look at that determined chin.” So many people asked Are you a model that after the year of rapes ended I had a badge printed: Yes. I’m a model. The pills hadn’t worked, I’d unwound to the same height predicted by the doctor who had measured my wrist bone by X-ray, at 12: I was, I am six foot two. I was trying to become harder, tougher. Obscurity was forever out of my reach, I was public property, and the shyness was savage.

    Newly adolescent, I was beautiful in a way that had long made men lean over fences towards me, call after me yearningly, insult me in the street. To Indonesian men when I was ten, eleven, twelve, I looked adult, because of my height. And because I was white I looked American, and American girls were easy: I was getting explicit and frightening suggestions long before I’d begun to bleed. I used to feel like some property of theirs that was being passed from hand to hand, the chiefest hand my father’s, his was nearest and he liked to make fun of the budding breasts commissioned by his wife; and when the music stopped like pass-the-parcel I would be unwrapped, slowly I hoped and perhaps even lovingly, I would be discovered, I’d be naked, I would be safe.

    It didn’t happen that way. Not in any way at all.

    I can’t always say it. The R word. I say “there’s a word? that rhymes with… cassette tape?” I say, “attacked.” If I need to be sure to be absolutely clear I’ll say, “When I say attacked: I mean in my own body, by a man.” I wrote teenaged poems after this happened which featured sex as a kind of horror film. I was the white-bellied fish gasping on the spear, the vessel of sacred fluids with its cork yanked out who now slowly bled out her essence all over the filthy seamed pavement. Trying to accustom myself, I described the rapist as “my lover”. He was my first lover, though he never loved me.

    I’ve had other women hide behind me when a neighbouring junkie approached us with a knife. I’ve had men hide behind me, more than once. Many people imagine a tall, strong woman does not need protection, or comfort, or support. But I know the sword slides just as easy, and just as hard, between my ribs as any other woman’s here.

    What happened was this. I spoke Indonesian and French. We lived on Java, where the suffusing sense of engagement with the beckoning world, the community of trees thrusting at our windows and the red volcanic soil were overpowering and intensely near. My natural spiritual landscape. I began to bloom, and to explore. I taught myself to play the gamelan instrument angklung and composed long, complex pieces which I would memorise and perform, roping in my brothers to play keys and drums. We made a film. I invented a language. At our international school we were allowed to go barefoot and lounge on cushions. “Write me a story,” the teacher said, when I finished the term’s work in Maths and in English in the first weeks of term, every term. “A book of stories.” I was floating in my own world, truly mine. I owned myself, I loved my days. Then we moved ‘back’ to Brisbane, a sprawling sub-tropical town where only my father had ever lived; we knew our cousins, our angry grandmother, and her terrifying companion, a woman impossible to please.

    In our new life we went to a new school. A religious school, Lutheran, Germanic. It was like Catholicism, the terror, the guilt, but without any female influence. Rinsed clean of us: no Mary, no saints. They taught no Bahasa Indonesia and no French. I caught up on the German class. We learned the difference between Sie and du, and our teacher looked pitying when I asked, which you would you use for grandparents: the familiar? or the formal. In my final year at school our parents went travelling round Europe. They left us in the care of some woman who had had an affair with a friend of my dad’s. Having helped him to break up his home, she now had no place to stay. This qualified her to look after my parents’ three teenagers. We came home from school on our first afternoon. She had set out glasses of juice. From now on, no afternoon tea, she said: you must wait until dinner. We clashed. My brothers are growing boys, I said. Mummy always feeds us when we come home from school; the boys need to eat. She was so incensed by my colossal nerve and by the ensuing argument that she threw me out of the house. 

I spent a couple of weeks in boarding school. At the end of the year I won a scholarship to the Goethe Institut in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. On a train platform in Munich I felt faint and fell over, and crawled on my hands and knees endlessly to the cold locker room. I sat crouched on some concrete steps woozy and thinking: they’re going to assume I’m on drugs. I wasn’t sure what ‘on drugs’ meant, but mistrusted my pallor and sweaty, sudden weakness. A lady came up to me at length in her kindness and offered to fetch the Red Cross. I couldn’t stand, and a cheerful man in uniform wheeled me across the station. I’d become vegetarian in boarding school when a country student told me how animals were killed, after a class trip to the abattoir. “I think maybe I need some iron or protein,” I explained, earnestly. “We’ll fix you up with a good meal,” he said, “and then send you on your way,” before wrapping the blood pressure cuff round my arm and I pitched forward and blacked out into roaring space. His colleague rushed in from outside. She was as white as that wall! “Sie war blass, wie die Wand!” They took me to hospital in an ambulance. I lived in intensive care five weeks and was given sixteen bags of good Germans’ blood. Had the Red Cross nurses sent me on my way, the doctors told me, I’d have finished my bleeding to death within a couple more hours.

    I was released into the care of a family in Mainz my parents tracked down through the school. They’d been teachers there. Within a week I had started bleeding again, internally. No one ever established why, and for a long time I feared a recurrence. Another round of intensive care, and learning medical German, and swelling very slowly on bags of others’ blood, like a tick.

    Should I begin to bleed again, the eight hour legs of a flight home to Brisbane were too long, I could die on the flight. The airports with decent hospitals – said the German doctors – in those days were too far apart. My father came over to take charge of me, like an artwork. He signed a waiver for the airline. We got back to Brisbane out of snowy January into the blaring humidity of high summer. University was about to start. My friends had scattered. I was sixteen. On our first day we filed into the great hall that’s now a gallery and sat in rigid alphabetical. I imagine it’s now a gallery because students are kept up to date by text message, there’s no student body at all. In my student body I sat in the J row, right behind the Fs. Behind this boy. This man. His eyes hidden behind a fringe. He was my age but seemed like a king. His mask for the terrors of late adolescence was so much darker than mine.

    I fell in love and we dated. I had the hope, the fantasy, that one day he might kiss me. No one ever had. I was a year or two younger than other students and the clique I fell in with, this boy’s friends, liked to tell smutty jokes whose punchline was: she doesn’t get it. The pressure chamber of Lutheran school, where we had to be a metre from the nearest boy, exploded into terrorising open slather in the courtyard. There was the boy, his hair hiding his face. Like my mother, he was fascinatingly hard to please. And I loved him. I kept telling myself so. He was so much cooler than I would ever be. One afternoon when my mother wasn’t home I invited him, like a twelve year old girl, to come study at our place. We sat on my bed side by side. I fetched juice. I had lured him there, wanting him to kiss me. He did. Then he pushed me over. Such weight, such pain.

    I have lived all my life in this body, my only home. I learn from babyhood: this is me. Other people, no matter how horrible or cruel, are outside me – I can move away from them, I can leave. That’s them. I learn to define myself, choosing what I want to be close to and what I need to avoid. Now someone I have chosen has invaded me. They’re here in my borders, inside. To pass out from the pain is like nothing compared with the psychic rage and flailing that is left to me when the world looks so different. A rape, let alone very many rapes, brings the cruelty and injustice of the world into my body, where I live.

    Rape entangles the self and the other. I said, You’re hurting me. Enmeshed with the enemy, you become one creature. You’re sharing my body. You are not you. Not sovereign. You are one beast with the beast. Pronouns blur and boundaries slide. You’re interlocked. This hurts, and it’s happening from within, like an eerie prank call from inside your own house.

    The first assault was thirty years ago this month. Why was I so filled with tears and why was I not sleeping. I only slowly recognised the month, the year. An anniversary. I am older than I ever imagined I’d be: I always thought I’d die young, and I have. Part of me has stayed trapped in the unraped state which was my dreaming, sovereign and benign in my body and in my own mind, the soul of the stars that looked down on me, arranging all my days to be filled with what I needed: to work hard and study; to write; and keep writing; to knuckle down learning to make music, make art, swimming endless laps up and down the pool that my brothers and I had started to dig, in our ambitious impatience, as soon as the spot had been marked out.

    Once I realised, so slowly, that three decades had passed and I was still grieving my lost self, my freedom, I decided to talk to an analyst. Did you have some part in what happened, he said. I felt my heart narrow and close. If only the vaginal canal could squeeze like that, had those trapdoors. Defensively I began to theorise, or perhaps to lecture. People tell us it’s our fault, because we’re female, I said, or wore this, or went there or drank that. He said, blandly, it’s not fair to blame women for whatever they were wearing. His response felt to me vague, and far too allowing. I felt myself filling up with fury: with might. In a steely rage I spoke out, between my teeth, I spoke with great certainty and an incorruptible distaste: I felt my deep deep power, I felt myself rising up. Only later did I realise the delicacy and the skill in this release. Nuns get raped, I said, tiny babies get raped. Women get raped in uniforms, in hospital gowns. My voice broke with furious pride. There is no outfit you can choose, I told him, that is rape-proofing. If there was, we would all be wearing it, every single fucking day, and that’s how you would know. As though reflecting on something I’d taught him, he said: yes… it is very unfair to blame women. For being attacked. And I started to wonder for the first time: how can I stop being so unjust to myself.

    In German my heart travels in a basket, breast basket they call it: der Brustkorb. In English it is carried not like lilies before a bicycle but like some wild animal trapped who now cannot escape, nor be reached. The rib cage. Peeled away from Adam’s white bone.

    If you’ve never experienced rape it is impossible to imagine the rupture. I’ve never heard a person who’s lived through rape use the word metaphorically. It is literal. We do not rape landscapes, forests, communities, the ocean. It’s an ugly word for a vicious and profound theft. Theft of self. A colonising, on the point of the gun that’s a knife.

    You’re not being hit, but stabbed. This is an assault from within. Have you checked the children yet? You’re connected, psychically, physically, to your attacker in an overwhelming helplessness that alone defines the piercing hot word overwhelm, the word overpower. This with someone who has claimed to love me and care about me, or at least to long for me and want me – they are now of me, they’re inside my borders, they’re inside my skin. The boyfriend who is now a violent stranger is now my lover. I fight to fight him off. He is stronger. That makes me weak. However I plead and rage, my words are nothing. My strength is nothing. I am overcome, frightened, weakened, dismayed. My ferocity is drowned by shock. I cannot catch what’s happening. It happens so fast, happens so many times. Every thrust is a fresh rape. Wait, I haven’t caught up, stop, wait. He is stronger than me and does not doubt himself. He has occupied another whole person, king of the world, shitting in their nest. He is willing to vanquish them – vanquish me – for a fleeting pleasure when I will pay the cost of this occupancy all my life. I pay for his orgasm with my life and carry its echoes in my red walls. Pay with my freedom and sleep. Decades later I jump out of a deep sleep suddenly and slam into the wall, a stone wall in a stone house in another state, in the south, and carry the stain on my bruised nose for weeks as though some man has walloped me. This boy is at this moment at his cruelest and he is in my citadel with me, he’s tunnelled in under my walls. And I did this with him, this to myself, like my brother who used to take my other brother’s hand and punch him in the head with it, saying Stop hitting yourself. When I look out from myself from now on it seems the whole world has changed. I am filling up with someone else’s blood, a stranger’s capital. Crouched on the steps I am in danger today of bleeding to death from within. I’m a long way from home and I’m white as the wall. Strap me down.

  • her blonde fall

    Today I pulled my ugg boots out of the back of the closet and yanked them on to walk down to the nearest coffee shop. Under the lowered sky the world feels more like a cave than a palace of splendours. It is cold and what withers my heart is that it will now stay cold here for months. Flowers are still standing on people’s balconies but the sky behind the buildings has soured. My little blue mug marches with me every morning past the Turkish men playing backgammon and the local alcoholics gathering outside the convenience store to drink beer. The prospect of seeing no blue sky nor hearing birdsong til May or even June is so terribly daunting to a tropical heart. It is cold and dim and it’s going to get colder and darker; the ground will freeze solid; the rivers will freeze over; it is going to be cold and dark, always cold, colder and darker and dimmer til Spring.

    The little cafe is brimming with people and music. I used to come in and write here, every day, back in 2012; that was six or seven sublets ago. I am aware as I move out of the way a third time, waiting for the Australian barista to pour, that my order, in Melbourne barista-speak, is a suburban why bother. A cafe owner in Northcote once translated the name to my face, jauntily, making rapid notes, then looked up and saw my eyes had filled with tears of mortification and exclusion. Poor guy. He spent the rest of the morning hustling my friend and me to ever choicer patches of dappled sun and offering us sample cakes and sandwiches. It’s just convenient, he lied, in a fluster. Extra hot is suburban. Decaf is why bother. In a culture which preens itself on hardiness and how many coffees everybody ‘needs’ to get through their demanding day, to drink caffeine free with a scalded milk froth is like walking unemployed into a cocktail party of the leisured, mannered, drunken wealthy and asking for a glass of milk.

    I’ve done that too.

    As the sky closes over our heads we turn within, I guess, a more meditative season. My heart aches after the email from my father today about the cosy family holiday they had, a farmstay with all the little children: like the childhoods we had, on our grandparents’ farm, a place now sold and probably built out. I’m in exile and I can’t go back. But as the natural landscape pleaches us in with its monotones of winter sleep, maybe that of the humans around me will brighten and deepen and welcome me in. The golden daytime candles are sat out on cafe tables already. The smooth endless music rolls forth. There’s the wintry rattle of cars over stones. The changing colours on the market, from bright summer fruits to rich, bruising plums and sprays of spinach, and beets. Two or three weeks ago we cycled miles out of town to a garden party, livid with lanterns. We swam in two lakes and ate breads and preserves our hosts had made, and felt sleepy at table. A large dog thumped her tail under the bench seat. At 2 o’clock in the morning on the quiet train home I lay huddled against the glass divider, replete. A woman got on and plumped herself against the opposite side of the glass. She dropped her head back and sighed. She had a glorious fall of long blonde hair, different colours of blonde, salon tipped, which flattened out against the glass as she took out her phone, compressing like a river of gemstones into one two-dimensional clotted sky after another as she turned her head. I lay sleepy with my face pressed into her hair, but for the glass, and I now recall it: and winter stings me, but there’s always the heaven of us.

  • stitch grandeur

    In Berlin people do all kinds of things out loud in public. You can buy drugs, smoke pot in the street and drink beers, you can walk with your dog into restaurants and boutiques. You can dance on street corners. One of the blisses of living here is that everyone is stranger and no one’s a stranger: my lifelong habit of conversing with passersby as though we were resuming a discussion only briefly interrupted is welcomed and usual, it’s easier, fine.

    I had never seen anyone embroidering on the underground. Sleeping, yes, fighting, putting on make up; drunk men banging in unison their fists on the roof of the carriage on their way home victorious from some football game – those were English men, ‘educated hooligans’ – and people jump on and sing, for money, or make speeches, and sell things, or just beg: and the man on the U1 who shows mutely his malformed and tiny index finger that pokes the air like a children’s puppet, the more whole hand holding a grimy crumpled cup for coins. A week ago there was a can of green peas, with a spoon standing in it, empty and neatly tucked under the corner of the seat were someone, presumably, had been eating them from the tin. To say it took courage to pull out my embroidery seems ludicrous. But so it felt.

    It is an egg I drew freehand, a world egg, and have been filling with gradual slow stitches ever since. The egg shape is crossed with a bulging peace sign. I started it to sew for my suitcase, a new suitcase, khaki swirling, for my first trip to New York in 2011. The suitcase was a present, its army camouflage motif bothered me. “I want to sign that there can be peace, there can be love, that I am not part of the army,” I said, stitching next to the Brooklyn nightclub singer who at the request of our mutual friend was putting me up. We had bonded. We’d spent long hours sitting side by side on her bed, talking about our lives. “But,” she said, “you are also a warrior.” And hugging me, on her stoop opposite “the park” (an all-concrete basketball court) in the snow. She was smoking, and her voice was deep and compelling and rough.

    I made that trip, and another, longer trip, with the peace egg still missing from my luggage. Now in Berlin I have decided it is time to get it done. So on the underground I pull it out. With trepidation but not sure why. The first thing that happens is a good-looking, somewhat raddled man whose tangle of hair attracts me gets on and sits opposite. We are the only two people in the carriage. Noticing my stitching he says, terrifyingly, “This city belongs to us True Germans.” Nods many times. I try to smile, neutrally. His arm goes up in a blessedly hybrid but tyrannical salute. “We belong here. All of those foreigners need to just get out. They should go.” I say something, noncommittal and small, afraid of what violence I might bring on myself if my accent or choice of words gives me away. Then nodding also I get up and slide from the carriage, clutching the fold of canvas and my hidden needle.

    Real Germans sew in public. I felt I had identified myself with a certain kind of wholesomeness, or primness. The screaming mess at the back of my tapestry, with its gouts of wool and complex knotting clots of colour hardening the cloth, embarrassed me. It was so clear to anyone looking on – which they did – that I was a rank beginner. Perhaps that’s why the man in his seventies who had been strap-hanging nearby finally swung his upper body over me and confided, in a shy, sweet voice, We used to learn embroidery in primary school. We made cross-stitch. (Modestly, with a soft pride): I was really good at it.

    As she got off at Wittenbergplatz a lady clutching her hands before her chest paused to say, It’s hard, isn’t it, keeping the tension even. Yes, I said, relieved that she had articulated this issue I had only half-noticed myself noticing. You need an embroidery hoop, she said. Oh! I said. I really do. Thank you for mentioning it. Then I carried the feel of her all the way home. There is something innate, I think, in us – in me – which responds to the wisdom of an older woman, however pragmatic and small, however tentative, because it is what we are missing wherever else we look. Sneering at age, excluding the oldest cultures, enslaved to the young and the new; literary festivals falling over themselves to include schoolkids’ first raps at the expense of experienced writer elders; orchestras staging dismal photo shoots in which fiddle-clutching violinists leap uncomfortably. The trouble with hip is, it never lasts. I long for the inner knowing, the voice of experience, the hip replacement: the lasting.

  • the dark lit me home

    I rode home after writing in a large dim room in silence with four other people. The evening blue was ripening to black, like a terrible bruise. In the dark other, unlighted bicycles hurtled past, people were strolling. The cars make way for bicycles and the cyclists make way for pedestrians and dogs. It is warm still and all the bars spill into the street. At a local bar the owner has a shaggy Alsation who was lounging out front, his paws sprawling forward, his orange ball lying some distance away. People walked around him without question. His head was tilted and he gazed into the sky abstractedly, as if he was looking at the moon.

    Today a boat went by under a bridge I was crossing on foot, just a little motor boat. Maybe the length of two bath tubs. Three people were sat in it, two wearing hats and two with dogs on their laps. They made a wide round and turned to the old rusted pontoon which may perhaps be where the bridge was once footed. The pontoon protrudes into the stream and is painted bright yellow, like an inflatable dinghy, for safety. The man with the doggie on his lap cut the engine and the three of them floated, inspecting the guerrilla garden of bright flowers someone has planted in the rusted out hollows.

    To carry the soil there and fill the rusted holes with fertility, to scramble down the bank every couple of days to water the plants: this seemed to me a beautiful enterprise. I showed the photos I made to a friend who said, Yes: I heard the guy who made that garden painted the outer rims black, because it was lovelier. Then he was fined because it was unsafe; and now all the old metal is yellow again. After our conversation I came out again onto the tree-lined street and rode home, following the moon all the way, more white than yellow, and hiding ineffectually in a tangle of treetops, in obscuring golden street lights, and behind partial cloud.

  • where it hurts

    What a strange feeling to watch Mitch Winehouse, father of the Amy who died young, telling the camera after her death how he felt it was not his place to save her. You can’t force treatment on somebody, he says, and shrugs. Meantime he is running the Amy Winehouse Foundation, his income derived from her work. After everything that’s happened, still an unawakened person: living in an unreflecting stupor, so it seemed, entirely selfish, he has milked his cow to death and still has no idea what went down, or who she was, or what life is like for a sensitive – that is, a wakeful – person.

    It is cold in Berlin at night the end of the summer, I drew my feet up on the chair. Two dogs kept tangling in a hassle of growls every time someone got up to buy a beer. Would be great, said the announcer in English and in German, if you could all carry your deckchairs over to the stacks afterwards, and bring your ashtrays back. Her fingers tangling in her afro loomed larger behind her like fame.

    The last film I saw here, a month ago, was about another tormented musical artist: Brian Wilson. I remember afterwards standing in the queue laughing as though crying again, watching all the Germans patiently waiting, chairs folded, to hand back their deckchairs to the two fellows rapidly stacking and folding.

    Today I discovered I have cried so much in the last week that the skin round my nostrils is all chapped and eroded. Standing in front of the mirror rubbing oil into it in little tiny circles I was thinking of the psychologist I spoke to on Friday, a much younger woman I have met a few times now, who is Danish. We speak in English. She said, I am sorry that these sessions just involve an hour and after that I have to let you walk out into the world all alone. I wish I could come with you for a few hours, and spend the afternoon beside you, just sitting with you. “There is nothing I would like more,” she said. I walked across the bare floor of the old sewing factory to the bathroom and dunked my face in the cold water several times, patting down the aggrieved and swollen skin, the red. I tipped my bag onto the floor and twenty-one sodden tissues rolled out on the tile. Later that night woken by street noise and unable to stop from weeping I rang my parents’ house. It was 3am here, there almost noon. “Have you tried concentrating on the positive things in life?” My dad searched for something to say when I became so entrailed in sobs I no longer could speak. “I meant to tell you,” he said, “about the friend from Engineers Australia I ran into at the spinal clinic. Lovely bloke. But he has broken his neck and now he’s paralysed from the neck down.”

    Amy Winehouse’s ex husband, the reprehensible Blake Incarcerated, lounged in his splendid corner chair. He was being made up for a biopic about his famous wife, had filled out, was feeling self-assured. He spoke about himself and then rolled on over her, already dead. Wha’ I fought was, he said Londonishly, the emblem of fake punk, I’m earning good money now, I’m a good looking man, I dress well – what ve hell am I doin’ wasting my time wiv ‘er? He had drawn her into the tiny heroin room, and left her there. In the film she climbed onstage, booed by the people who’d been chanting her name, and began beseechingly hugging one big black man after another – musicians who reminded her, I would imagine, of one of her only true friends, a bodyguard who used to stop her from going out for more booze. Her girlhood friend’s voice broke describing how they had rung the father imploring him, please, do not let her tour. But she ‘ad commitments, innit. So he put his wretched daughter, skinny and cowering, on stage in Belgrade, where she stood trembling and evasive until she was booed off.

    In the outdoor audience, no one stirred. The story was heartbreaking and base. A person eaten alive by the public, undefended by her nearest loves. We were aware in our deck chairs that we had all feasted on her, like Diana, like Marilyn. We are entitled to feed on the female: the role of a woman is to cater our eye.

    A slight wind rattled the screen. In eerie silence they showed slowly the unhappy photographs she had taken of herself in her house in a daze, a woman hounded on the street. She only had to show her face at a window to be blinded all over by mega flash bulbs. Her husband himself and her father, deserter of his family when his daughter was ten, are in their own ways mega-flash bulbs, though dim: yet both have survived and now flourish on the messy heap of her memory and her fame.

    We are a cruel culture. We trash the wild. The queue round the corner to see this girl’s life, the silence that spread from one person to another, were a searching in the self and a tribute. The film makers had pieced it all delicately together from the home movies she’s left behind – and from footage in the vocal booth – and from interviews with those who loved her and those who exploited her gift.

    This outdoor cinema is set up in the green in front of a famous smoking squat, where rivers of drugs have been consumed. It now houses galleries, the summer cinema, and a restaurant which is always booked out. Gift in German means poison. Tony Bennett said, she had the true jazz voice. Jazz singers don’t want to be up in front of 50,000 people.

    A breeze stirred the trees in the prolongued, painful silence. It was cold and growing dark round half a moon. We were Berliners, many of us people who have tried at some stage to suicide by substance. Four lights came on in the big house, a hospital before. She drank so much that her heart just stopped. The treetops stood there stately, shaking a little. I drew a sigh in the immaculate silence.

  • light at night ja

    Sometimes at night I like to talk to myself
    in the dark, on the way home, on my bike
    and then Berlin you drive me crazy with desire
    for you, the trees which flicker over my back
    like beetles’ wings, going light and dark, light
    and heavy, all three at once

  • blue last

    The sun is shining over Berlin today and I feel so glad of the blue it lights. All too soon it will be dark all the time, a world half-awake, candles staining fogged daylight windows and all the birds have flown except for ducks, pigeons, sparrows, swans. I wonder how it feels in the heart of a tiny brown bird, to cock your head on the grass and study the inner knowing that will bring you sweeping up into the slipstream to sail south, a sailing that’s more a machine, a relentless effort, the seamed world a faraway town under your belly feathers and your dream map: that you’re on the right path, that you have twelve days’ further of flying to go, eleven, eight, five, three. Imagine the chatter when everyone gets there first. Imagine the mournful little spaces here and there in the loud crowd of trees where one voice or another bird’s is missing, deleted by accidental death during the year or maybe simply falling out of the sky on the way over. Plummet. All labouring down the round world to beat the icy creep of winter, that consumes everything edible and buries all the seeds.

    Birds know Berlin only in the sun. In Switzerland climbing a mountainside by steep red rail with its leather seats my friend said to me, in the dim clatter of the neck bells wooden-tongued and serene, the farmer can tell – if one of his cows is missing – he hears it from the herd in their song. Penguins find their young among twenty thousand birds all milling, every one screaming. I will search all winter for the one whose voice is silenced to me, out of my earshot, out of reach, a sweet subject I cannot leave alone like a sore tooth, a tree falling, a shot out of frame.

  • of wheels & wings

    Today a day of wheels and wings. On the high street I set myself an errand, which failed, as the Turkish woman who repairs garments has locked her shop and flown south for the summer, into a tide of incoming birds. Her storefront was locked like a little dark cage. On the street out front two big bikes sputtered and racked, their owners shouting conversation back and forth as they waited for the light to change.

    Who among us is not waiting on a change in the light? A small boy, not too small, maybe eight or nine, was making his way down the pavement. He stopped and gazed at these beasts, two big throbbing machines, the riders almost supine in that cock-cocking slouch. Spine relaxed to a slump, pelvis tilt: this was manhood. These were Harleys, or whatever other bike there is that renders that cocooned helplessness. Hands up curved like a child riding papa’s back and peering over. The boy made a thumbs-up and grinned. They didn’t see him. I was walking behind and swept up my own arm to jab downwards. Look, I showed them, swooping the air above his head like a homie. This boy here, needing your manhood. The nearer one saw him and smiled, cracking a face almost paisleyed in swirling tattoos. The boy called out something. Made a fresh thumbs-up and offered it. “Was?” the biker yelled: whut? I left them talking – masculine, back and forth across a several arms-length’s distance, in roars, through the machinery of their own engine noise – I was grinning. They seemed to me all somehow boyish, and sweet.

    Very late alone I had lunch under the trees. The water beckoned with deceitful gleams, fish-whiffy at close-up. Every passing car was loud on the cobbles, which make tyres sound flabby as though hopelessly flat. On the pavement a woman passed wheeling a bicycle, sailing under steam, under her own steam. Her long brown hair tangling behind her. A small, queenly child perched on the bicycle seat. The child had clots of molasses-coloured dreads in a long ponytail; she rode her mother’s bicycle as though it were a steed, her beauty an admonition on us all. The sister came pedalling behind, dreaming atop her own bike as her little feet propelled it forward slowly. The slow, stately pace and their undisplaying femininity gave the family a processional quality.

    Overhead, the summer trees flickered. In three months all these trees will be bare, I suppose. Late at night I’ve been out walking and heard the trees start up the breezes as though it were old spirits of the place who pass. The breeze travels high off the ground, in the canopy. The branches rustle and are silent again, shifting the dark. In the old world, I have heard, people knew how to make news travel from tree to tree. We have forgotten our every enchantment. I think we seem to long for that. The flickering fireside of a computer or gather-round television. The mercury of incessant palm-warming phones, that promised to free us and have enslaved. As I was frowning across the road into this thought, a fellow rode past on his ridiculous bicycle, wearing a tiny porkpie hat. His bike had tiny wheels and a tiny frame. Pedalling like a clown, his knees under his chin, he too stared ferociously ahead. But he looked up and caught my eye and slowly, piercingly sweetly smiled, and I smiled back and thought: this changes everything.

    On the tabletop a glossy orange ladybird made its way trundlingly by. Ladybird, here: let me give you a lift, I thought, deceitfully, meaning here ladybird… give me a lift. I put out my finger flat to her, hoping she would launch herself off me and fly away so I could launch on her a wish. She climbed me and kept climbing, clear along my finger and up onto the back of the hand. Scaling the knobbly writer bones on my wrist she came up softly through the hairs on my speckled forearm. Softly, softly, all the way to the shoulder she came. I put up my hand, patting: Where have you gone. She fell out of my hair, locked in the jaws of a ferocious millipede. He was black, glossy, and writhing, he had her pegged by the petticoat of her wings. As I said aloud, Oh, no! and began to try and separate them I was aware of a prejudiced loyalty, stemming not just from the delicate, brief intimacy shared with the beetle but also her cute, round prettiness, from a human-projecting point of view. He was hungry too but I had no thought for him: even the pronouns I assigned seemed to me a kind of self-adoration disguised as compassion. It seemed like he was consuming her in front of my eyes. I put my thumbnail in between them. That’s how he died, because I accidentally separated his head from his body, a much larger brute, crude and intrusive. His body curled and stilled. The bird hobbled away, her skirts awry. The glossy orange wing case folded neatly and defensively whole but one sheer inner wing trailed long and ruffled behind her. I suppose this creature now will starve and will die a painful death, where she might have been eaten at once. I got up and walked home through the jolting stream of pedestrian-sized traffic, the bike trailers towing kids home from kindergarten, children loose and relaxed in their own inner worlds, gazing, musing, one little boy holding a flapping cut-out drawing in front of his face and singing sleepily as in a dream. I craved their size and their sense of safety. I envied their wheels and their wings.

  • that, and all the gods of grief

    For four weeks now, this terrible grief. It takes up residence in my throat, is heavy, slides into the sweet solar plexus where self-belief resides. Crushes back my breathing. Gives me the tired. It makes bed seem a dire, unavoidable residence, where I will spend my days: all of them. Though I enjoy so much in the world and spin always silks out of myself like a dim spideress, though I am happy and joyful, resolve to be joyful, and happy, the grief comes in big crashing waves and will not be turned aside, it comes over me from above or up from within, I can’t tell, turns me outside-in, a paper bag with only crumbs. It feels the grief displaces me, so I have to make way for its passage, a weight of a body in water. I hold it and I feel the weight. I am lonely with grieving and savage with it, and cannot turn it by.

    It’s been a month now since breadsticks at dawn, I have counted over the perfidies in my mind. I’ve tried telling myself it would hurt worse if he had found someone in any way interesting to or compatible with him. Within days he had started to outgrow the one weaving acid threads around him, her ‘devotion’ as he called it and her sudden love that reeled him in. This rancid manipulator and her stale routines. I guess it would feel worse, and it would also feel better. He told me how they wound up having breakfast together, because she rang him from outside his house one day: Oh hey! I just happen to be in your street. What, no – did I wake you? Have you had breakfast? Her first thought on climbing out of their consummated bed was to message me: can I see you? I am worried about you. The remorseful emails which that day began, from him, the trickery and campaigning of his superficial mistress, brought little comfort, and their literal fuckery, an eight-day wonder, hurt me unbearably. His weakness. His actions. His inaction. The lies.

    What man is proof against the machinations of a predatory woman. She had brought him it seemed to me only an assiduous, an arduous mimicry of human emotion. Are you ok? I am worried about you. Within a week he and I were talking again, missing each other, trying to reach us, even as he fucked her for good measure a couple times more. When we finally met up he seemed to be suffering that solitude that wrongful intimacy alone inflicts: the grief that is like mourning a suicide, as the suicide. I felt the lack of real connection, he said. I was just so sad she was not you.

    The sex wasn’t planned or premeditated: it just happened. Sure, I said. Not planned by you. What married woman does not carry condoms in her wallet? His weak passivity was gut-weakeningly terrifying to me. In debunking our closeness, so natural, so hard-won, to somebody so shallow, so utterly self-serving, he had pulled the plug out of the sea and it was draining. What mother would not leave her three-year-old at home all night to go out on the fuck? “That you chose that,” I ranted, “over me – it’s so insulting. It’s not even an honest comparison.”

    Meanwhile the everyday experience of foreignness, sharpened now: an aching displacement and fog. My visa, which cost us both some struggle, came through – kind of. Provisional and freeing. Immediately the terror and suspense ebbed away and I entered a teeming fugue of dismay: what am I doing here? I feel so sad. The chic little creameries on my street, in a neighbourhood where I am part of the rapid hated gentrification, the perplexing, frantically delicate flavours they manufacture and interminably sell: white chocolate and parmesan; matcha pistachio; ‘caramel fleur du sel.’ The American menus in New York last week which made me cry in booths in diners, over breakfast: actually cry. Home fried chicken – with waffles – and maple syrup – butter – and collard greens – why? I don’t understand, I whispered miserably to our host. I ate the American food, or a quarter of it, felt myself weighted and sinking to the bottom of a crowded bowl.

    The fortnight before, in still-familiar Germany, a sudden brain freeze at the local bakery. It is just an ordinary shop on a high street, but they sell so many varieties of bread I could not, half-awake in mid-morning, decide. The mechanically helpful German lady repeated, mechanically, Was darf’s sein. From hazelnuts. Sesame. Poppyseed, rye. The half loaf or the whole biscuit, the whole wheat, the full corn. I stood back from the counter and tried to count them, to marshall some sense out of the world. Counting was hard and I had to do it twice. This was a half hour before the announcement over breakfast that my beloved was falling in love elsewhere, when everything began to dissolve. Eventually I counted up 71 different kinds. These did not include strudel, incompetent croissant, sweet rolls, buns, fruit tarts.

    Summer is in full swing and all the seats are full, like a children’s game. I used at first to find it intimidating walking past those cafes, European, where all the chairs face out into the street. It is a theatre, I dislike treading the bored. Dispiritingly, every chair til June has a blanket folded over its back, so you can sit in the sunshine and enjoy the sun’s light on your skin when you’re too numb from the cold to feel your face. All that light without warmth, it’s confusing. Now disorientation reawakens my foreignness, if I had a hometown I would go there.

    I watched a movie where the woman dithers between her husband and a new alluring man. They are young, but they’re bored; at least, she is. The movie was quiet and slow, dimly glowing, like a fish tank. The husband is boring because he is just being himself. I wuv you, he says, routinely at night on the couch, unaware he is being compared. He is dull, he’s unable to step up for them both: I’d have left, too. But the doubting wife is working in secret, in the dark. She’s pursuing something that cannot exist: how tantalising. She is unable to say to her man, we are stale, you are losing me, and I want you to pull me back. I don’t want you to lose me, I want you to love me. Another man is making his intentions plain. If you want me you will have to speak, you will have to act.

    Call out for me, love, come claim me now. The double story of her wishful affair, his wistful half-knowing, made uncomfortable viewing. Somehow it was as if they were on a date that he’d been looking forward to; as if maybe he thought this girl might be the one for him; but that she was only speed dating.

    We made late night phone calls in whispers, walks where we both cried and cried. Our meetings were painful and very often angry, very often tender. “My beautiful Cathoel,” he said, wrenching my heart. Trying to touch me as I ducked away. Yet hope springs infernal. The affair had dwindled into a recital of her trauma, some of it so lurid it seemed to me almost improbable, an edge of lunacy, a frightening unhingedness; he took her to drug therapy, said she was in meltdown. Even three days after we’d first parted he told her, this is all happening too fast; I need some time, I need some space. Please don’t call me for twenty-four hours. This she took as an instruction, as controlling people do. Immediately there followed an announcement to the husband, I’ve been fucking elsewhere. She called, sobbing. I’ve told him! and he is so angry! The manufactured and the precipitated dramas, the tiny ideas in giant font, the three a.m. text messages, the darling self-regard. The improbable and faintly perplexing flavours, parmesan cheese with white chocolate. And his decision, more important in my world, to preference this over our everything. So you compared us, I said, and you chose, if only for eight lousy days, her. But you worked in the dark. Had you shone a light on it, she would have shrivelled in comparison. Because she lacks honour, depth, truthfulness, interest, and evidently, humour. She only had what you projected onto her. In another mood I would write, you too lack truthfulness and depth. So I think maybe the two of you are ideally suited.

    Dutifully he retailed her story of the nice guy husband who simply doesn’t understand her. When I started to laugh he looked less offended than surprised. He shared their emails with me. We began to talk anew. We had the opportunity, suddenly, to fly to New York, where he texted her: I’m thinking of you all the time. In a bar in the lofty blue brainspace dome of glorious Grand Central Station we got drunk when the American barman didn’t know how to serve pastis and brought us two brimming tumblers, four or five drinks apiece. Have you got a photo of her, I said. Yes, he said: are you sure? He went down to the bathrooms and I turned to the woman sitting beside us, who had been scrolling and scrolling on her phone for half an hour. I said, Can I ask you about something? Something personal. I need some girl advice.

    Yes, she said. She put down her phone. She turned on me her large, grave eyes. As rapidly as I could, I told her: my partner – indicating the empty stool – cheated on me. He told me he was falling in love. I’ve just asked him to show me a photo. Because otherwise it’s been tormenting me. Now I’m not sure. What would you do?

    Hmm, she said: that is hard. Of course you’d want to see, see what this is. See her face. But it might make you feel bad because she might be really… Yes, I said, and we both sort of smiled. She said, suddenly, I think – if it will put your mind at rest – then you should do it. But if you do it, then after that you have to really let it go. No reminding him, every time you have a fight. No throwing it in his face. You have to look her in the eye, and then forget it.

    I think you’re right, I said. My mind was lightening. Thank you so much. I put my hand on her arm. That is really good advice. You are wise. I asked about her own situation. She had moved here from India, with her husband. Now her husband has died. She’s decided to stay on. “I want to make a life here, have children.” I said, I know you will have really beautiful children. We smiled at each other. Then my ex-partner came back, slid into the stood between us. He showed me the photo. She was so plain and so winsome that I gasped, without meaning to, “Seriously?”

    Three years ago there were no ice cream shops in the street where I am now living. Now a fourth is being built, on the corner where the tiny meadow springs. Up and down the street graffiti blare. If you want to speak English, go to New York. Berlin hates you. I walk along among the summer bicycles, the tiny children pressed in folds of cloth, the strange stridency that some German women’s vowels have that carries in the open air. The American accents, belling and unwelcome on the street. It has taken me all afternoon to get dressed. In my favourite cafe the barista won’t meet my eye, he lets me stand by the counter and wait. I give him my order, the same order I give him every day. He spreads his hands and tells me, strangely, we’ve run out of honey, we’re not getting it again. Stupidly I think, But – I’ve only ever spoken German in here. I turn away without a word, my chest aching. Grief is an animal looking for its place in me. It displaces my salt ways of being in the world. Summer in Berlin is a time for rejoicing. Beer bottles stand empty on top of all the bins. People line the canals. A Russian woman with spiky lashes stops me, carrying a map: Excuse me please. Where are the shops? Some days I don’t leave the house til nightfall, and walk proudly, carrying my head on its stalk, defeating an agony of alienated shame. Under the trees I let men’s glances wander over me in the dusk. I wake in the night, which is when things seem hardest. I ask myself should I even be writing about it. For no matter how scrupulous, however fair-mindedly I try to write, I only have my own experience. I can only ever render some tiny sliver of the mosaic mechanism, a peephole, untruthful because partial. Life is complex and hard. The ache is acid, residual, lasting. In the mornings its breathing overcomes my breathing. It climbs down heavily to the chest, to the base of my ribs where I was torn from my Adam and I miss him, raw, sore, and hunting. There was only one man whose eyes I sought, on summer evenings: that will never now be true again for us. I get dressed again to go out at last. I feel the agony of love we neither of us had courage for, and have both betrayed, lost out there in the long blue evenings which alike are visitors to this iron country, a brief season uncharacteristic of the place which all too soon begins to gather in its deep chill, its oppressive dark. At weak moments feeling sad, and lost, tired, and bereft, I am asking myself, are you ok? I am worried about you.

  • don’t shoot

    Jeez, America, stop shooting each other. At least in Australia we only drown refugee babies, jail children, beat young Indigenous men to death in jail cells with phone books.

    I am thinking today of the Albanian security guard who came out of her way to welcome us to the Cloisters, a museum in Tryon Park which seems to have salvaged all the bits of bombed-out churches and cathedrals in Europe that had survived, as splinters, the War to Unending War. We saw the daunting entry price and had retreated to the entrance hall to confer. “We have our tours available in German,” she told my companion, twinklingly. Then, turning to me, the Australian, “I’m not sure we have anything available in your language.”